The COVID-19 pandemic has created a big divide of winners and losers in the health and wellness business. Now more than ever, marketers are starved for health promotion ideas that work. The short answer to how to market wellness products? Direct response advertising.
It’s essential to cultivate a “strategy-first” mindset that privileges measurability over feel-good marketing. In triage, the goal is to deal with the most important problem first.
In health and wellness marketing, the first benchmark is to stimulate sales that will get your business through this trying time. The second benchmark is to build a long-term growth plan that will serve you in 2020 and beyond.
We’re going to focus on the highest-value marketing tactics you can wage now to make an impact on your revenues for 2020.
10 Best Ways to Promote Your Health and Wellness Brand
1. Start with Strategy
A strategy first marketing plan looks at the whole puzzle from a perspective similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Take care of the biggest & most urgent issues at the outset while you build a plan to enable long-term growth.
This means deciding on what matters and what does not for your customers. Concentrate on finding the highest value to them and build your marketing around those benefits.
This also means making a commitment to measurement and honest reflection about what works.
2. Measure Everything
You can’t improve anything that you don’t measure. And you can’t start measuring without setting the boundaries for how you consider an effort a loss or a win.
Vanity metrics have never been less important.
Real KPIs like click-through-rates, conversion rates, average order value, cost-per-acquisition, and customer lifetime value are measurable and they will show you the path to continuous improvement. Fail to measure these and you’ll see your media spend to get out of hand while your cost per acquisition skyrockets and your customer lifetime value goes down.
3. Invest in Email Marketing
Every client I work with has something we refer to as “low hanging fruit.” Email is one such type of opportunity to create a flux of revenue. Health and wellness brands spend huge amounts of their marketing budgets on new customer acquisition. But what about increasing your customer lifetime value? It’s equally important to focus on the customer relationship once you’ve acquired their business. Email automation is one of the most cost-effective and easily implemented tactics you can apply, right now, to make sure that you’ve given an audience that ALREADY wants to buy from you even more opportunities to opt-in to your offers.
And just to remind you of some recent metrics around the impact email can make on your funnel, consider the value in reaching 18-22% of your audience for “free” compared to reaching 1-2% of your target audience through organic social media:
4. Refine Your Audience
Don’t try to be all things to all people. By continually identifying and iterating your highest-value buyer segments, you’ll get to know what they expect, what they want, and what gaps the marketplace is experiencing so you can continue to serve them and provide solutions to their pain points. A too-broad audience makes for difficulties in nearly every area of business.
5. Make the Most of Social Media
Everyone wants to boil down social media to a handful of secret tactics. I want you to keep your head in the game here and focus on what works: using social media in three ways:
List Building for Health & Wellness Brands
Social media is a great place to share gated content like quizzes or guides. These free offers generally don’t cost a lot in media spend and you can leverage your email sequences to convert readers into paying customers on the back end.
Generating Product Sales for Health & Wellness Brands
It may seem like an obvious tip, but if you have an eCommerce site to your business, you can sell directly on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. From shoppable pins to product carousels, it’s important to make it REALLY EASY to buy from you.
Feed the Funnel for Health & Wellness Brands
Aside from active tactics like list building and sales, you can also build an audience that you can retarget within the platform by serving up in-stream video ads. Some users may convert on the front end from video ads, but having a solid retargeting methodology in place will allow you to capture more attention from an audience you’ve already invested in.
6. Employ UX Optimization & Mobile-First Design
On the technical side of marketing for wellness brands, you’ve absolutely got to be up-to-date on your mobile design, site speed, and overall UX optimizations. It’s a key part of SEO performance as a result of Google’s recent algorithm updates that have taken SEO beyond the world of keywords and into UX.
7. Leverage Reputation & Review Management
In a world where anyone can say whatever they want – and essentially, everyone’s watching – you need a protocol for integrating and responding to user feedback. Especially for health and wellness products. Amazon and Google reviews have never been more critical.
8. Design Impactful Experiences
You can take your marketing offline and into the real world. While the pandemic has put a stop to the big outdoor campaigns we’re used to seeing from big corporate wellness events, there are still ways to leverage community engagement and create a bigger impact through events.
Virtual summits have become an important revenue stream for B2B health and wellness brands who used to rely on in-person conferences for the same benefit.
9. Lean Harder into Video
Your audience wants to see you on camera. If video isn’t a part of your content strategy, make it so.
Video content is in explosive growth mode, so people have come to expect it. It’s no longer a “nice-to-have.”
One of the benefits of video aside from the interactivity and visibility it affords? You can atomize video content into social posts, infographics, blurbs, and blog posts.
10. Cultivate Trust with Influencers
You don’t need to hire Kim Kardashian to sell more supplements, but there are likely micro-influencers specific to the problem you solve in your business. Similar to customer reviews, getting some added credibility through an influencer’s endorsement has a twofold effect: you’re introduced to a new audience of buyers and they’re already primed to trust you thanks to their trust in the influencer.
That said, be sure to exercise discernment when choosing influencers According to eMarketer, 61% of marketers struggle to find the right influencer that’s a fit for their brand campaign. Other influencer headaches include issues around FTC compliance, the cost and time required to manage this “channel” and the persistence of fraudulent activities online — namely, fake followers.
People Also Ask:
How do you market health & wellness?
From a psychological perspective, marketing health and wellness requires we tap into consumer motivations, pain points, and triggers. Health and wellness brands sell a better future. So your copy and overall marketing messages should future-pace the delivery of transformation.
When we consider health and wellness brands, your marketing strategy needs to be customer acquisition-focused. How does your company serve its customers? How does it deliver a service or product?
Starting with “how” leads to a strategy of simplicity. Focus on a simple, measurable marketing funnel.
How do you promote health and wellness products?
The best way to sell health products is through direct response marketing. This means using measurable channels to deliver predictable results at a cost that is in-line with your margins.
How do you promote community wellness?
Community wellness starts at home. Focus on your company and your employees. From there, you can get some real-time data on what’s working in real life. It may be helpful to observe what other companies are doing to support community wellness, but whether it’s effective? That’s hard to measure.
Practically speaking, sponsorships are a good way to leverage events that are happening in communities without having to take on the burden of planning and execution. But as a marketing tactic, this isn’t as easily measured as some of the direct response tactics we’ve discussed. This would be more generic brand marketing.
I get asked these kinds of questions over and over. And these are the things we’re seeing that work in the marketplace. If you need some help figuring out what next step is right for you in your business, I’d be happy to work with you. Drop me a line or check out my consulting options to get started.